right now I am being overwhelmed by school. I have five classes at two different community colleges.
Two classes at CC1 I have taught for the last six years. They are fairly easy to teach, though there is a lot of grading. They are composition classes after all.
Then at CC2 I am teaching a freshman comp and a freshman lit class. It doesn’t matter that I have taught freshman comp for six years because I am using a new book. (That happened last semester at CC1.) And their requirements are different. So I am really flaying about trying to get my feet.
And I have a lit course which I must teach to follow their specifications, without a novel. (Totally different from at CC1 where we have a novel and the research paper is over that.) I’ve never taught the class without a novel. It’s quite a shock to my system.
I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on drama, because I don’t love it, but I have to have something the students can do their research papers on. So that means drama. But I did decide to throw out Othello; it is just too long. We are going to do Glaspell’s Trifles instead and another short play. That gives us a lighter day and we can work on other aspects of the paper, etc.
I don’t love working from new books. That is difficult, because I don’t know how long things are going to take. But I am doing okay.
The worst part (besides grading for five classes and having to write syllabi for two new classes) is that I’ve messed up my grades. My MW freshman comp has gotten five grades. My TTh freshman comp class has only got two… I messed up and didn’t give the TTh class the freewriting. I thought it was the MW class that was behind, so I gave them another freewriting on Monday. Ouch. Now I’ve got to catch the TTh class back up. That will be a struggle.